An Encyclopedia of Tolkien, by David Day

An Encyclopedia of Tolkien: the History and Mythology that Inspired Tolkien's World, by David Day (Canterbury Classics, October 2019), is the latest in the author's guides to Middle Earth.  If you have a young bibliophile, who has just read Lord of the Rings and fallen hard for it, this is a perfect gift.  It is a tremendously attractive book, bound in soft leather with a green silk bookmark, the sort of book 12 year old me would have died to own, and one that would have inspired me to head down wonderful rabbit holes exploring myth and history.

Day produced an earlier encyclopedia, Tolkien: the  Illustrated Encyclopedia, back in 1991.  However, the focus of this particular effort sets it apart.  It is not meant as a guide just to the people, places, and events of Tolkien's world, but as a guide to the bits of history and legend that (maybe) Tolkien had in mind (unconsciously or not) when he created them.  (Day tends to ignore the "maybe" part of this, laying things out for readers to accept at face value). In his introduction, Day discusses Tolkien's metaphor for how stories are born from a "Pot of Soup" to which new bits are always being added.  Essentially, this book is a collection of bits from a soup of European history and mythology that Day has fished out and linked to Tolkien's mythos.

Sometimes Day is successful in this, making credible links between Tolkien's fiction and historical and legendary events.  An example is the comparison between Tolkien's Battle of the Field of Celebrant and a quote describing the real world fifth century battle of the Catalaunian Plains, one which had never occurred to me. I also enjoyed Day's etymological exploration of the name "Bilbo Baggins," and I could give many more examples of Day's interesting links between real world and Tolkien world story.  Unfortunately, in other instances Day seems to be trying too hard to make connections where none necessarily exist, or pushes his connections too far--for instance, his effort to link Beowulf and Beorn fell flat for me, and some entries, like those for "brownies" and "Puck," are so tenuously tied to hobbits that they seem almost like padding.  So it's a mixed bag, but one that was often fascinating reading.

Of course it's impossible for one book to contain everything.  But there's a lot more to Anglo-Saxon literature than Beowulf, and I wish Day had included more of it.  And I wish Day had pushed harder at the negative portrayal of the Easterlings, and the historical context beyond the "Barbarian Hordes from Asia" that went into forming Tolkien's derogatory attitude toward non-Westerners.

Still, the fun of seeing connections (and questioning them, and even fact-checking them) makes this a book many fans of Tolkien will enjoy.  The inclusion of brief retellings of three primary legends that served as sources for Tolkien’s creations—the Volsunga saga, the Nibelungenlied, and Richard Wagner’s Ring Cycle add educational value.  There are also about 200 black and white pictures, of varying quality, mostly by men, that serve primarily to show how vividly real Tolkien's world can become to its readers.

In conclusion--a great gift for a young fan in particular, but not necessarily great for readers who are already familiar with a lot of Tolkien's source material, or those who are themselves trained in academia, which calls for stronger arguments than some that Day makes.  That being said, the point of the book, that these sorts of connections exist and can be explored, may well open wide joyful windows for many readers.  I myself wrote my college application essay* on how the Lord of the Rings inspired in me an interest in archaeology and Early Medieval history, and this book would have been fuel to that fire.

*I got in.  I don't have a copy, which is good, because probably it would make me squirm to read it.

disclaimer: review copy received from the publicist